Monday, 7 May 2012

Drunken Altruism

I love Cuba.

We’ve been there a lot.We’ve done a lot of the “All-Inclusive” thing there.I know I’ve slagged it as not being a truly
cultural way to travel but it provides a reasonably priced way to get our feet
on the ground and we’ve found many ways to enhance the experience.

Cuba is a really remarkable place.It’s unbelievable to me that this little
island country of 11 million has staved off that imperialist defender of
democracy 90 miles to the north for over fifty years.Regardless of your politics you’ve got to
somehow admire this.By no means do I
extol the special little brand of Marxism that Fidel, Raoul and the boys have
going on down there but I will always be a fan of the underdog and admire the
tenacity of the little guy.

We were recently in Santa Lucia, Cuba.Santa Lucia is on the Atlantic coast and is
about 75 km from Camaguey, which is Cuba’s third largest city.

There’s something different about Santa Lucia.It’s not like any of the typical resort areas
in Cuba we’ve been to.From an aesthetic
perspective, other than the spectacular 20km of undeveloped beach, the rest of
the area is flat, almost prairie-like scrub.If Cuba were a capitalist nation, I would imagine the drive to be
through miles of symmetrically ploughed and irrigated agri-business
fields.As it is Cuba, the landscape is
occasionally dotted with a poor farm and the odd herd of emaciated cattle.

I think the thing is that this place provides great access
to real Cuba.There are a number of
villages around the area that you can visit and meet Cuban’s that don’t live
with the benefit of resort employment.They are incredible humans with big hearts and smiles and every last one
of them is in dire need.

We brought a truckload of stuff down with us to give
away.If you fly with Cubana Airlines (a
Cuban run airline) remember they are very lax on weight restrictions when
entering the country.This will allow you
to pack a suitcase or two (or even three or four) full of old clothes, shoes,
over the counter medicine, tooth paste, toothbrushes, floss, soap, cosmetics,
candy, baby products, toys, colouring books, crayons and just about anything
else you can think of to distribute when you get down there.That is of course assuming that the crazy
Cuban flyboys can put the pressurized tin can on the ground in a single piece.

We stayed at a small resort, only one of four in the
area.It is really basic but the place
has got an incredible vibe to it and it attracts people back, year after
year.

Talk about a paradox when you can eat and drink in paradise
like it’s Spring Break in Lauderdale and balance off the excess by driving
around the area giving stuff away like you’re Santa Claus.I’m not sure if this is altruism or some
perverse attempt at redeeming the guilt of being born into relative abundance.

What strange biological and physical tweak, had these people
deposited here in the middle of paradise, politics and poverty and me in the
coddled comfort of Eastern Ontario, Canada?

Maybe it’s a little contrived, this impersonation of Santa,
but the warmth and emotion that the Cubans give in return for receiving is
clear evidence of their overwhelming need for everything.Many will not easily accept charity outright
and quite often you will find some handicraft has been dropped off to you the
next day.

So we decided to do some discovery work, to spend some time
away from the resort to give away the majority of the goods we brought
down.You often hear that the resort
staff is relatively affluent.They do indeed
have direct access to tourists and that can certainly act as a pipeline to
material stuff, but we are a finite market and it’s extremely competitive
getting to us, so they’re often left battling amongst themselves for
goods.We like to spread the meager
wealth to as many people as we can.

Suzanne on a mission is a juggernaut.She has a unique knack for finding what she’s
looking for.She’s an awesome resource
for me.I’m a relatively shy person but
once the ice is broken, I can often overcome my social ambivalence, even occasionally
appearing to be perfectly house broken.Suzanne is totally the opposite.She’s in a state of calm, ease and grace in any social situation and has
little hesitation engaging people in real conversation.

So it was of little surprise when I came out of the bank
after exchanging a few shekels early in our trip, that I would find her deep in
conversation with a couple from Belleville, ON.As it turns out these people come down to the area a number of times a
year to help out on a project that their Pentecostal church has going.Ah ha, I thought to myself, she’s done it
again.Who better to point us in the
direction of humanitarian aid than the Christian zealot?

They recommended that we actually take one of the only day
excursions in the area.Back in the 1940’s
some wealthy dude from California built a huge ranch in this area of Cuba.Of course the ranch was assumed by the
government after the revolution but has been kept operating.This couple recommended that we tag along on
the tour, as Vincente, the man who manages the ranch, also has access to a
nearby village where we could distribute our stuff.

So a day or two later, we hopped on the bus to Rancho
King.The itinerary indicated that the
ranch cowboys would entertain us.First
we would see a small rodeo demonstration, then a tour of some of the grounds,
then the village and finally back to the ranch for lunch before boarding the
bus back to Santa Lucia.It sounded like
a perfectly campy excursion.

It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you’re
least expecting it.I think I had been
to a rodeo or two at some point in my life but it had been a long time.I felt fine as we walked up the stairs and
sat in the small grandstand.That was
until the second the chute opened and a little calf ran out for its life with a
cowboy on a horse bearing down on him.As soon as the lariat went around his throat and the rope jerked his
neck tight, I realized I don’t like the rodeo show anymore.I stuck it out for one more calf but when I
found myself loudly rooting for the calf, thought it best to just walk away.

I got up and wandered around.Unfortunately I had the misfortune of bumping
into a cowboy prepping the first bull for the bull riding competition.You know when you see something happening and
you’re unwittingly curious about what’s going on and you continue to watch
until you’ve seen way more than you wanted?Well…

I didn’t notice it until later but the cowboy had just
finishing tying a rope taught around the bulls’ testicles.When I looked over he was lashing the back
and then the face of the bull with another rope.It was then that I realized what was actually
going on and I high-tailed it in another direction.Later I happen to catch him poking the bull
with a big stick just for good measure.

When we first sat down in the arena, Vincente gave us an
introductory talk about the cowboys and what they would be doing.He mentioned that the animals are well
treated and that nothing is done to them that wouldn’t be at rodeos in
Canada.This may indeed be so, but I
felt like asking Vincente how he would feel if I tied a rope around his nuts, whipped
him in the face and poked him with a big stick.

As I had a bag full of goodies with me anyway, this gave me
an opportunity to start playing Santa Claus early.I walked around giving stuff away to the
ranch workers while the rest continued to watch the animal torture show.

Mercifully the animal anguish was over before too long.We then had a quick walk through their garden
of medicinal plants.It’s interesting
that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban government promoted the
idea of individuals growing these plants to offset the subsequent lack of
medication. Finally from there we moved onto the segment of the day that we had
come for, the village.

It really feels good to be able to provide something to
these people but in essence it’s really a sad thing.These people gather at their gates in the
hope that one of us will see fit to provide them with anything.In fact there was a tug-of-war with one of my
old t-shirts between a woman and an old man. He lost and when I went to give him a consolation
ball cap she nearly ripped it out of my hands.

We eventually gathered in the backyard of a woman’s house.She grows a lot of her basic
necessities.She had banana, coffee,
guava, orange, mango, sugarcane, pigs, and chickens, even a little tobacco to
twist up some roll-your-owns.We had
some cane juice and coffee and then settled down while Vincente gave an impassioned
talk.

He spoke of his dislike of the word poor when describing the
Cuban people.He preferred we use the
word humble when describing their plight.He said that although they lacked the material goods that we so easily
take for granted, they never went to bed without something in their belly and
with a full heart.He spoke of the
revolution and the ensuing blockade, clearly making the distinction for us that
this is indeed a blockade and not an embargo.He spoke about what his government provides and what it does not.He said that they, like our government, are
not perfect but that they continue to do their best given the circumstance.

Thankfully we had coffee and juice at the ready in an effort
to keep our pie-holes shut.Suzanne
leaned over to me and questioned whether the political prisoners being held
here would think that Fidel, Raoul and the merry pranksters, were doing the
best they could for them.Regardless of
how romantic I tend to get, you can never really lose sight of the fact that
communism is as obsolete and broken as any other socio-experiment presently
underway.An oligarchical system run
without a competing voice is left way too wide open to corruption, and
regardless of Vincente’s sugar coating, there is nothing humble about poverty.

Even the concept of free university education is
deceiving.Sure the education is free
but without the time to work how do most students afford to eat or house
themselves?

Call me a wide-eyed idealist but I’m pretty sure that the
most basic of all human tenets is to be allowed to believe in whatever the hell
you want.There is something inherently
wrong in incarcerating anyone strictly due to his or her opinion.Our democracy may be run by a bunch of
abhorrent fascist-monkeys and is well on its way to morphing into a two-class
morass of capitalistic perversity but at least we can still go around calling
our government fascist-monkeys.Well…so
far at least.

A number of the Cubans that we have spoken with are
extremely blunt about their situation, their level of need and what they feel is
their incarceration on the island.Who
knows what will ultimately happen politically in Cuba over the next few years
but I’m guessing it will be a long time before anything gets sorted out that
will improve the lives of the average Cuban.

About Spirit Y'all

Hey! I’m Jerry. I recently left a well paying job after twenty years because it bored the hell out of me and left me feeling pretty well useless.
My wife Suzanne and I went to an Ashram in India and I kind of put some things together there. One thing I put together for sure is that I need to write.
SpiritY'all is mostly anecdotal stuff about conventional third dimension things like travel, culture, literature, current events, even fashion and sports with a wise-ass spiritual and ecological perspective.
I know it sounds a bit contradictory but I believe that juxtaposition is one of the beauties of life.
Oh yeah and as I’m one of those that believe the Earth reached critical mass long ago, I won't waste a lot of time on sensitivity.